Wallace_Stevens.pdf - Heythrop College

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imaginative idea satisfies the imagination. A rational idea may not satisfy the imagination, and an
imaginative idea may not satisfy the mind, and you know where this is going:
From this analysis, we deduce that an idea that satisfies both the reason and the
imagination, if it happened, for instance to be an idea of God, would establish a divine
beginning and end for us which, at the moment the reason, singly, at best proposes, and
on which, at the moment, the imagination, singly merely meditates. 25
The verbs here (‘proposes’ and ‘meditates’) are significant: all the mind can do is propose an idea
for adjudication and rational acceptance, while all the imagination can do is meditate, presumably
on the aesthetic quality of what is created; Most of the time (all of the time), they work
separately, ‘singly’ not jointly.
Later I will express doubts about the possibility of ‘speaking God’ at all in language unless there
are strict, subversive controls in operation. I also wonder about the possible inclusion of God
within ‘the real’ as Stevens and others construe it. My fear is that this would result in what,
following Heidegger, is called ‘onto-theology’, the creation of a single category, ‘being’, in which
God and the world are conceptually placed. But Deus non est in genere: God is not one item in a
class of things. A great deal of modern atheism seems to treat God as a possible ‘fact’ within the
world, as a ‘secondary cause’ alongside other (creaturely) secondary causes – a ‘fact’ of course to
be rejected as unnecessary and fantastical. In an important sense, God does not add anything to
the world, and if you are a Thomist, you will also hold that the world does not add anything to
God. These points are true because the relation of God and the world cannot be viewed as an
addition of one thing to another: you do not get a better account of the world by including God as
an element in the account. If you include God as a feature in such an account, it can only be as a
pointer to why the world is at all, not as a datum that alters other data. We may speak of ‘God and
the world’ but God is not added to the world in the way that John is added to Mary to make two
possibly happy people, nor does the world mark an ontological enhancement of God. The world is
not alongside God in any serious sense other than in how we use words. 26
What is difficult to see is how God might be, could ever possibly be, a fiction such as Stevens
thinks. Of course there are fictive gods whom we imagine, whom we create out of our metaphors
and projections, whom we and others declare to be dead, but such gods are how we meet the
meaning-creating dimension of ourselves and eventually come to be pleased, satisfied by what we
imaginatively grasp about the real. But by definition, this is not the transcendent reality, the
radically other goodness that is not an object in the world and therefore cannot be the object of
our imagining. The god who might be the supreme fiction is created by our imagining; the
condition of knowing the true God lies precisely in withdrawing God from the web of such
imagining. Where, in an Idealist aesthetic, such as I suspect that Stevens offers, we are in touch
with the supreme through the idea of the supreme, by contrast, classical theology, less tainted
with romantic or philosophical idealism and keener to distinguish between ‘the real’ and ‘the idea
of the real’, denies that having the idea of God gives you access to God at all. 27 Conceptio dei non
est deus.
25 CP, 668. The essay begins with his discussion, and rejection, of Pascal’s strict disjunction
between reason and imagination.
26 ‘In the phrase “God and the world”, the word “and” carries all the connotations of relatedness,
dependence, communication, revelation, union, and a destiny of ultimate blessedness. The world
is not alongside God but is grounded in God’s act, so in the phrase ‘God and the world’, ‘and’
signals a deep relatedness’ (J.McDade, ‘Covenant in Christian-Jewish Relations’ unpublished
paper on Heythrop Staff Webpage). In Aquinas’ terms, God’s action is ‘primary causality’; what
things (and people) do is ‘secondary causality’; the key rule is that there is no conflict, contrast or
binary opposition between primary and secondary causality as though the presence of one
interferes with the operation of the other.
27 ‘Stevens can be said to be offering a poetic transposition of transcendental idealism, where the
relation between thought and things and words and world is re-described as the relation between